My experience in medicine and what it did for my CS studys
I started studying medicine back in October of 2017. It had always been a dream of mine to help people the same way I have been helped. Well maybe a little backstory to explain. When I was a kid i got ill a lot. I spent the first 4 New Years in an ER because i had some sort of ilness, which wasn’t life threatening but still it was rather annoying. When I was 5 my mother discoverd a mass in my left cheeck. As it grew we decided to go to a doctor who then took it out in an operation. The mass turned out to be a benign tumor. As I got older I had 5 more of those benign tumors and every time it happened we had to go to a hospital and I LOVED it.
So now that we know why I wanted to study medicine, why did I fail at it? Well short answer: it was horrible. I hated pretty much everything about studying medicine. In my experience it was just about learning hundreds and thousands of definitions, biochemical circles or some other stuff. I had always been a good learner, but I need to see a reason or benefit in it and I just didn’t have that in medicine. This meaningless studying really didn’t go well for me. I studied and studied and I just couldn’t retain enough information which resulted in my failing more than one test. But I still came through the first two years of my study without too much problems. But after two years I had to take a state test that was requiring me to retain so much information that I just could not make it. It really took a toll on my mental health. I studied 16 to 18 hours per day and it still was not enough to pass the test. So I decided to reatake it again two times with one semester in between the attempts every time. But it was just not possible for me to get through. Don’t get me wrong here, the test isn’t that hard (otherwise no one would pass obviously) but it was just too hard for me because I was just not made for this kind of studying.
So after 3 years of medicine I decided to stop it and search for a new thing. So if I learned one thing in my 3 years I learned that I am way more comfortable studying things that require understanding rather than repetition. Which led me to computer science. I had programming in school and I rather enjoyed it. Furthermore I had abig project in school where I made a weather station with a rasperry pi. I enjoyed it a lot but after my Abitur I went fort he route of medicine first. So I settled on Computer Science as my new studies
I started my first semester in 2020 at the Friedrich-Schiller-University in Jena, Germany. The first Semester was rough, I needed to get back into higher level maths which I didn’t use for 3 years. Most people will know, that even simple tasks like a integration or derivative can be rather hard if you don’t remember how to do it. So I sat down and relearned a lot of maths. And even than I saw how much of a difference it was to my studies of medicine. Once I understood a concept I could adapt it to the problem and use it without fail. I learned so much faster and so much easier than I thought possible. It was wonderful, until some higher level maths came into play. I struggled a lot with those concepts but in the end I was able to understand nearly everything and pass my first Semester without failing a single exam (a new experience for me).
So the years passed and although I was not able to achieve top marks I was so much happier and more energetic while studying Computer Science. Which brings me to where I am now. I love what I do and I love learning new stuff like programming a website like this or making projects with my friends.
So do I regret studying medicine? Not at all! I learned more about me in those three years than I would have been able to learn in a lifetime of studying other subjects. I found friends for life which helped me get through the tough time after breaking of my dream of studying medicine . And I learned some useful stuff. And probably most importantly I learned that my true passion might have been CS after all. I wouldn’t change a thing if i had the oppertunity to and I really believe that’s a good thing.
So for everyone struggling right now. Keep going! It will be worth it in the end